Shiv Sena-BJP going tragic, comic – and incompetent

The piling garbage all across the city posing danger of epidemics is a challenge to the Shiv Sena which has been controlling the city since 1988.

The internecine war between the Shiv Sena and the BJP is beginning to have tragic consequences. In the mid-1980s Bal Thackeray, who was too extreme for even the BJP, had successfully polarised Aurangabad between its two main communities and, after long years of peace, the city is burning once again. Strangely, such a sensitive city has no full-time police commissioner. Nor does it have a municipal commissioner. The absence of these two crucial officers is causing tremendous problems not just to the citizens but also increasingly adding to the tension between the Sena and the BJP who now seem to be deliberately working at cross purposes with each other.

HT Photo

For months now Aurangabad has been facing a severe garbage issue — tonnes and tonnes of rubbish has been piling up in and around the city which so far has no plan to convert the waste into energy or even suitably dispose it of. In March, villagers from nearby settlements protested about the dumping of the garbage in their backyards and the resultant police lathi charge on them scalped its police commissioner who was made to go on compulsory leave by the government. The police force has been headless ever since as has the civic body and the Sena has accused chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of deliberately ignoring the appointment “because he is in search of a pro-BJP officer to fill the vacancy”.

While that may or may not be true, the piling garbage all across the city posing danger of epidemics is a challenge to the Shiv Sena which has been controlling the city since 1988. Its detractors, including the BJP, accuse it of engineering the recent riots in Aurangabad as a diversionary tactic to draw attention away from its alleged incompetence. At the same time, riots in the city on the issue of a pre-Ramzan bazaar that has been set up on the streets for nearly five decades without much trouble to both citizens and the administration are being seen as an issue of the chief minister’s incompetence (he holds the home department), and the Sena is only too happy to give credence to that suggestion, even as the NCP has openly accused the BJP of facilitating the riots to create extreme polarisation between the communities in the build-up to the 2019 elections to the Lok Sabha.

While two innocent persons have died in the clashes and more than 40 others injured, the situation has been complicated by the discovery of petrol bombs, stones and chilly powder from the conflicted area. As also the surfacing of a video showing the police looking the other way even as rioters go on rampage. That points to pre-meditation, not spontaneity, and brings a sense of dèja vu from the 1980s and early 1990s when such acts were routine, and the Sena-BJP combine was accused of vitiating the atmosphere. Now, at loggerheads with each other, they are pointing fingers at each other even as Ramzan approaches and the city remains tense and without a police commissioner, an unprecedented situation anywhere in the country.

The feeling of mismanagement by Fadnavis and the state BJP only grows when one looks at how the party let the Sena hijack the Palghar Lok Sabha seat from under its nose. It was almost funny the manner in which the Sena awarded its ticket to the son of the deceased MP belonging to the BJP which in turn poached a Congressman to contest a seat that never belonged to the Congress in the first place. Add to it the fact that a BJP minister appealed to the Congress to support its own rebel fighting on a BJP ticket to defeat the Shiv Sena in Palghar; one wondered if the party had lost all its marbles or was taking itself seriously at all. It would be comic if the situation was not so tragic.

Perhaps the BJP was expecting a quid pro quo for facilitating the election of Vishwajit Kadam, the son of the late Patangrao Kadam, on a Congress ticket in his father’s constituency in Sangli. The region is a Congress-NCP stronghold so the Sena had no qualms in supporting the Congress openly. But the BJP has been trying to make a dent in this Congress bastion and in the past has even pinched candidates from the party to facilitate its victory. So I do not know if it was tragic or comic that the BJP candidate withdrew his nomination and gave up the fight even before it had begun. What is the state BJP really up to? Such mess- ups are so uncharacteristic of the party in recent years.